Profile

David Lagakos

Share this person

David Lagakos is a Lead Academic for IGC Ghana.

David Lagakos is an associate Professor of Economics at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D in economics from UCLA. He as previously held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis as well as Arizona State University, and is currently a research associate with the Economic Fluctuations and Growth Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on macroeconomic and growth theory. Much of his recent work examines productivity, particularly as it relates to agriculture and developing economies, as well as human capital.

Content by David Lagakos

Blog post

In Pakistan, increased tax enforcement may be a more effective way to raise revenues than increased tax rates, given the large share of informal employment. This could in turn increase GDP due to increased government investment capacity.
Goods and taxes
Like most developing countries, Pakistan has a comprehensive set of statutory taxes that firms are required to pay on a...

Project

In most developing countries, tax collection capacity remains inadequately low. Nowhere is the lack of tax collection capacity more apparent than in local governments, which collect a negligible fraction of local income in taxes (Gordon, 2010). As a result, local governments provide inadequately low levels of public goods - such as roads, schools and electricity - which are...

27 Jul 2017 | David Lagakos, Anders Jensen

Project

Why are there so few large, productive firms in the developing world? To what extent is weak fiscal capacity a constraint on firm productivity and economic growth? This project seeks to answer these questions using a mix of new micro evidence and quantitative theory.

19 Oct 2016 | David Lagakos, Ethan Ilzetzki

Project

Electrification and industrialisation of developing economies are closely linked. This study assessed whether electrification of rural areas can help to induce structural economic transformation, and whether it has an effect on in-country migration patterns.
We found that Ethiopia’s rural electrification policies led to structural transformation of village...

Project

This study seeks to understand why, in most developing countries, measured value added per worker is so much lower in agriculture than in other sectors of the economy. Simple two-sector models predict that value added per worker should be equal in agriculture and “non-agriculture,” and yet in the average developing country, national accounts data show that value added...